We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
SALMAN RUSHDIEPerhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
-
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It’s like that. If you’re going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
SALMAN RUSHDIE